What guidance exists for writing technical documentation?
What are some of your favorite examples for easy to understand documentation when tackling a new framework, language, or library?
For further actions, you may consider blocking this person and/or reporting abuse
Top comments (14)
Hi Rachel!
I compiled a list of technical writing resources; you'll find books, courses, and links to documentation style guides from GitLab, DigitalOcean, Google, and Microsoft. Hope this helps!
Dope! Thanks for upping that to GH! 💯❤✌
Thanks!
I really like the documentation of the Python library scikit-learn. It’s structure provides an accessible section for newcomers with introductions, tutorials ad examples. But also the class-by-class documentation contains lots of details, usefull cross references, etc.
Check out Laravel and Vue docs :)
Laravel design is always of such a good taste.
I've been working on rewriting the Redux core docs, and collected some notes and resource links on good docs writing practices.
I particularly liked the article What Nobody Tells You About Documentation.
On that note, I just published a brand new "Redux Essentials" tutorial that was written using the lessons I'd learned from those resources.
The Vue Docs are SO GOOD 💚
Spring Boot and Spring Framework documentation sites are terse, easy to read, as detailed as they can be and well styled. All the corpus says "professionally organized" and "well-thought". That's not easy, given all the functionality that both products cover.
The best documentation that I've seen is the DigitalOcean API documentation.
For a small opensource project I believe that Laravel Voyager has some great docs as well.
The tidyverse documentation is phenomenal.
In R we have a few conventions for documentation, which includes both short form (per function) documentation, but also long form (vignettes). Because we also have R markdown these are both driven by the language itself.
In addition we also have packagedown, which turns docs into websites, though I'm sure this exists in python in a similar form as well.
I haven't read it in a long time (for reasons) but back in the early 2000s the PHP documentation was amazing.
Each function had a clear explanation with clear examples plus user contributions for edge cases.
I haven't found easier to understand documentation since.
Actually, if I can broaden the definition of documentation, Gatherer, the Magic: the Gathering card index, is pretty great.
I can tell you that whoever writes NordVPN's copy for their release/patch notes deserves a raise:
nordvpn.com/blog/nordvpn-windows-r...
IMO, a perfect blend of technical and plain talk.
+1 for the Vue specialization!
💯❤✌